MFL Live Draft How To

So, you're considering running your "live draft" via the MyFantasyLeague.com web site? Great! Since your live draft is one of the most important parts of the season, it's essential that you do a little preparation for running your draft on-line, to make sure it goes as smoothly as possible. Therefore, we strongly encourage you read and understand all of the following potential "gotchas" related to running your live draft on the MyFantasyLeague.com site.

We recommend live drafts on MyFantasyLeague.com only for leagues that want to conduct a draft all at once, where the owners are geographically separated (i.e., not all together in the same room). If all owners are together in one room, or, you'd like to conduct your draft in a more "slow" email-type fashion, we do not recommend the use of the live draft feature. For a more detailed explanation, please visit our How To Decide Which Draft Is Right For My League page.

b.	Go to your Draft Reports page - is your draft order set up properly? Is there the correct number of rounds for your draft? If not, both of these things can be changed via the For Commissioners > Setup > Draft Order Setup - All Rounds and Draft Setup - One Round pages.

c.	Have owners traded draft picks before the draft, and those draft picks are not yet reflected on your league Draft Reports? If so, you can make those kinds of changes to your draft order via the For Owners > Trades option to be able to trade draft picks between owners.

Are owners set up to be allowed to go into "live draft" mode? Go to your For Commissioners > Setup > General League Setup page - make sure that the "At the start of the season, rosters are determined by:" option is set to "On-line, "live" draft that happens all at once, taking a matter of hours to complete."

Is your draft timer set up properly? Also in the Draft Timer Setup page - look and see what the "Turn Draft Timer:", "Set Timer To:" and "When the timer expires:" options are set to - make sure that they properly reflect your league rules regarding how long an owner can be "on the clock" for, and what happens when that time limit expires.

The "pre-draft" feature on the site was designed mainly for long-running email-type drafts, but at times it can be helpful for live drafts, too. The most important thing to understand about this feature is the following:

Any pre-draft picks submitted by an owner will be selected as soon as it's that owner's turn to pick for that given pick of the draft. In other words, if you have submitted pre-draft picks for round 2 of your draft, as soon as the team before you in round 2 picks in your draft, the system will go through your pre-draft list at that time (even if you're actively logged into the draft!) and make your pick for you.

If an owner has to step away from his computer for a moment for whatever reason during a live draft, he may want to pre-draft for an upcoming round or two so as to not hold up the draft while he is away, so the system can automatically make his picks for him.

The "My Draft List" feature allows owners to set up a personal draft list for picks, without automatically having those picks made as soon as the team is on the clock. It should be thought of as more of a personally-defined draft guide.

The "draft tracker" feature was designed to make a pick for an absent owner. Using rules described in the "How The Draft Tracker Picks Players" section below, owners that allow the timer to expire may be able to have the system make an intelligent pick (based on other 2008 completed drafts) on their behalf.

This is probably the most important step of all - all owners need to at least experiment with the live draft pages a little bit before the start of your live draft to make sure that they don't have any problems accessing those pages from their computer, and get a general feel for how things work before your draft actually starts. Otherwise, you may well spend the first half-hour or more of your draft just making sure everyone is logged on properly, and understand what they need to do on the site. Once owners get into the live draft page, if they do have errors or problems, they can use the link to the classic MyFantasyLeague.com live draft, which provides a simpler interface for drafting, but should still allow them to draft along with the rest of your league.

For an important real-time event like a live draft, if things go wrong, they can snowball in a hurry. You need to be sure that even after you've done all of the above important steps, you consider the following.

Pause Timer - use this to stop the timer in a live draft. Once clicked, this will remove the countdown timer from the live draft page.

Reset Timer - use this item to reset a timer (that may or may not have been previously paused) to the max per-pick timer value.

Skip Pick - click on this link to advance the draft by one pick without making a selection for the current pick.

Undo Last Pick - select this item to revert the draft by a single pick. You can also use item "b" below to undo multiple picks quickly.

Clear Above Messages - click on this link to clear out the entire chat message history for all owners. Once cleared, this information cannot be restored.

If someone (or the system) makes a pick that you'd like to "undo", you can do that by going to the For Commissioners > Setup > Draft Setup > Revert Draft screen to "back up" your draft to any point in the past, and then continue drafting. Note that after doing a "Revert Draft", everyone in the league must refresh their entire live draft page to see the updated draft results. This is especially useful if several picks were made in error. See also item "a" above (Undo Last Pick) to easily revert a single pick.

In some cases it might be easier to just change a draft pick (ie, an owner made an obvious mistake). Use the For Commissioners > Setup > Draft Setup > Change Draft Pick screen to adjust any single pick in the draft. These adjustments will include the text "Replacement pick made by Commissioner" in the comments column of the draft report. After doing a "Change Draft Pick", everyone in the live draft room mush refresh the live draft page to see the updated draft results.

d.	When a pick just needs to be skipped for any reason, use the For Commissioners > Setup > Draft Setup > Skip Draft Pick page. Skipped picks will include the text "Pick Skipped By Commissioner" in the comments column of the draft report.

If you find that people are having problems getting access to your live draft, and the system is still advancing your draft due to the timer expiring, the first thing you should do is turn off your draft timer via the For Commissioners > Setup > Draft Setup > Draft Timer Setup page for a round or two until everything smooths out a little, and then turning it back on.

d.	Sometimes, owners may have unanticipated computer problems, Internet connection problems, personal emergencies, etc. that cause the best laid plans to go to awry. Do you have a backup plan in place in case any unforeseen problems occur?

e.	If you have other problems that you can't immediately solve, please use the Help > How To Get Additional Help option available from all league pages - that page goes over in detail all of the options you have available to you for getting further assistance for your draft problems.

In conclusion, we know that your live draft on the MyFantasyLeague.com site will be a great success, but to ensure it's success, you need to follow these important instructions above!

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While it's possible to run a live draft without the league commissioner present in the live draft room, we strongly recommend that a league commissioner be present at all times for a live draft. The "Commissioner Controls" mentioned above are essential for recovering from problems that might happen during the course of a live draft - without a commissioner present, no one will be able to pause the draft timer, undo draft picks, or any of the other sometimes necessary commissioner options mentioned above. This situation becomes extremely difficult to manage for deluxe leagues that hold multiple drafts at the same time.

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If pick 1.01 has been pre-drafted, and the draft timer is on, the draft will start as soon as the Draft Start Time passes. However, if pick 1.01 has not been pre-drafted, then the timer does not actually start until the franchise owner of pick 1.01 actively makes his/her selection. This has been done to allow all owners extra time to get into the live draft.

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In some circumstances, all owners may have to use the "Refresh" button on their web browser to get an up-to-date live draft page. If any of the following events happens in your live draft, "Refreshing" your live draft page will bring it back up-to-date: Commissioner does a "Change Draft Pick", commissioner changes the draft timer length on the "Draft Timer Setup" page, or owners trade draft picks in the middle of a live draft (or, anything else along these lines that causes the draft order to change in the middle of a live draft).

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If there will be two different franchise owners at one computer during a live draft, you might be tempted to let each owner "take turns" at the computer, logging on and logging off of the site between picks. We strongly discourage you from taking this approach, as it will lead to a lot of confusion and delays in your draft. Instead, we recommend installing two different web browsers on the computer (Firefox - available at http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ is an excellent [and free!] web browser) - then, one owner can remain logged into the site using each browser, so they only need to take turns at the keyboard, and they will not continually log in and log out of the site when it's their turn to pick.

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If a majority of franchise owners are at one computer with a few located elsewhere - AND - an online MFL draft has been defined, have the commissioner login to make all the picks for the group of owners as the constant login-pick-logout for each team would be too cumbersome and interfere with your online draft.

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Here's a detailed scenario from a customer who reported unexpected live draft problems, even though they thought they had completely prepared for their live draft. In their testing of the live draft room, they did it with one laptop computer on a wireless network. When their real live draft started, there were many laptops on that same wireless network, which completely overwhelmed the network's bandwidth, effectively grinding their live draft to a halt. The solution to the problem? Only have one commissioner use his laptop for the live draft, entering everyone's picks as they happened.

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Since the league chat feature is per league, and live drafts for deluxe leagues are per division or per conference, the chat module displayed in the live draft will display all league chat messages, and not just the chat messages associated with the current deluxe league division/conference draft, which might cause some confusion if multiple drafts for a deluxe league are happening at the same time.

Look at league's starting lineup requirements. Look at franchise's current roster. If there are any holes in the current roster that prevents the owner from submitting a complete starting lineup, get a list of those positions that the franchise needs. If franchise can submit a complete starting lineup already, look at all positions.

Look at current draft tracker results. Given how many drafts are collated there, determine a cutoff - the cutoff is the minimum number of drafts that a player has to be drafted in to be looked at (otherwise, he'll just be ignored). This prevents players that were drafted in only a few leagues, but happened to be drafted very high, from being assigned to a franchise. The cutoff starts out at 5% of the total number of drafts. For example, if there are currently 150 drafts in the draft tracker, the system will only look at players who have been picked in 8 or more drafts

The system takes up to 4 passes over all draft tracker results in order to try to pick a player for you. In the first pass, it tries to fill a starting lineup need looking at only players that we drafted in the above cutoff number of drafts. If no players were found in the first pass, it halves the number of drafts for the cutoff, and looks again. If no players were found in the second pass, it halves the number of drafts for the cutoff again, and looks again. Finally, if no players were found in the third pass, it ignores the starting lineup needs, and looks for any player that was drafted in at least the lowest cutoff number of drafts, and looks again.

The most important take-home message from this long explanation is that draft tracker picks were originally designed for (and are still intended for) a "last-ditch, if all else fails, for some reason the owner (or someone else) messed up and didn't make his pick, so let me make what might be an appropriate pick" kind of situation, and definitely not a "make the same pick that a well-informed semi-expert, who understands all the nuances of my league rules, injuries, etc., to hopefully make the pick best pick possible" kind of situation. In other words, if you expect to have a perfect roster at the end of your draft, you need to be present for your draft, and not rely on the draft tracker to make picks for you. Some specific situations when the Drat Tracker has been known to not pick good, or even pick at all, for leagues, include:

3.	If your league has an extremely deep roster (say, 400 or more players on your fantasy rosters in total), it may not be able to pick players towards the end of the draft.